


Day 34

by etal



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017) RPF
Genre: Anal Sex, Armie is hazily single, Blow Jobs, Eventual Smut, Groundhog Day, M/M, Not Really Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-07-27 19:02:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16225358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etal/pseuds/etal
Summary: Old school Bergamo fic plus groundhog day





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to rubyintyale and Ulliva for giving me ideas for Armie's music

_I wake up everyday it's a daydream_  
_Everythin' in my life ain’t what it seems_  
_I wake up just to go back to sleep_  
_I act real shallow but I'm in too deep._

Armie wakes up the wrong way round, feet on his pillow and head at the foot of the bed. This happens sometimes when he’s sleeping in a strange room. The other wrong thing, 10 seconds into this bright Monday morning in the beautiful city of Bergamo, is that the wake-up track on his phone has been changed _by someone_ from the mellow tones of Tame Impala's ‘New Person, Same Old Mistakes’ to Dizzee Rascal’s ‘Bonkers’. 

Dizzee is on the other side of the room, in the pocket of Armie's pants. Getting up and out of bed with a spring – no hangover, hah!, early night, _motherfuckers_ – he kills the noise and checks his messages. Sounds from the street drift up into the quiet: there’s an Italian-sounding argument going on somewhere close by, the bells start to chime for 10 o’clock, and the day swims into view. The last day, then. Day 34. The last scenes. They’d already said goodbye on the train platform. Run around that goddamn hillside. Now there was a final bit of moping and some more fucking dancing to do, the puking, and then the kiss. The last kiss. He stretches and tosses his phone onto the bed.

OK! Shower, clothes, breakfast. He has to bend nearly double to get under the shower and just as he's soaped up the spray starts to spit and spurt and ends up as a dribble of freezing water that he has to sort of distribute about his body as best he can. _Fine_.

Once out and dressed, he takes the stairs a couple at a time and nearly crashes into the maid in the hallway. She’s carrying a pile of clean towels and she looks dazedly at him so he’s not surprised when she gets flustered and starts dropping stuff. There’s a whole little pantomime of apology and helping with the towels only to knock more off and eventually he gives up.

“So ah… dove si trova… the others? Like, dove Timothée?” She frowns, confused and his usually excellent Italian is not working here. “Dove…?” he does a little impression of Timmy, big grin, eyes-wide, flutters his hands about.

“Ah...” she points to the door and he _grazie_ s and heads on out.

There’s a moped with an above-averagely annoying whine in its engine circling the piazza. Across the square a young man is shouting up at a girl on a balcony who is shouting back down at him and looks like she’s threatening to drop a flower pot on his head. Armie times his passage over the piazza to avoid getting mown down by the moped, and joins the crew in the café, settling in the last empty chair, which, unfortunately, is next to Luca. They hadn’t parted on good terms yesterday. Under the table, Timmy puts his feet up on Armie’s ankles. Armie lets them rest there a second and then rearranges himself so that he tucks his legs back under his own chair. Timmy raises his eyebrows at him. The waiter brings him an espresso and he sends it back and asks for an americano.

“Take your time this morning,” Luca is saying. “Walk around the town, spend your time as you please. The Basilica Santa Maria Maggiore is very interesting. Back here at noon for the pensione scenes. We’ll have an early dinner, ready to be on set at 8pm, please.” 

Armie’s americano arrives and he drinks it and watches the commotion caused by the collapse of the bright yellow awning over a bookstall on the other side of the piazza like it’s TV so he can avoid looking at Timmy again. He’s going to get away with this and it will be done. He only needs to get through today without fucking it up, breaking down or falling apart. 

Timmy says, “So do you wanna...”

Armie can just _tell_ that Luca is working up to some kind of lecture so he snaps up his stuff from the table and sets off, calling over his shoulder, “Sure thing. Let’s go and tour the hell out of this Basilica.”

The Basilica is cool, but it doesn’t enchant him like Santa della Maria in Crema did. The only available guide doesn’t speak English so Armie gets left out of the conversation, with Tim occasionally translating information about architectural features but he’s sort of hazy about some of the details (“I think she said the mural is sixteenth century but it could have been something about a fire maybe?”) and Armie can only really enjoy stuff like this if he knows he’s getting the right dates and eventually he heads out for a smoke.

They’ll be fine as long as they keep it light he keeps telling himself, and back at the pensione he plays the tickling and the wrestling like it’s the first day of the holidays. Luca asks for more gaiety and they laugh up a storm. For the next shots, naked by the window, he dreads Luca trying to get him to talk, but he doesn’t say anything and at least Armie’s on his own for this part, Timmy curled up on the bed as Elio sleeps. He’s not letting the shadowy feeling in, not even for his close-up, and he’s grateful for those hours of being made to study Debra Winger, because he’s trained the muscles of his face to make exactly the right expression. He can paint an impression of it onto his features with no trouble.

He leaves as soon as he’s done and they move on to the shots of Elio dreaming. Back in his room, he lies on his bed and tries not to think. After a while, there’s a knock at the door that he knows is Timmy and he scrambles for his phone before he shouts at him to come in.

“Hey." Timmy appears around the door, takes a few hesitant steps inside. "Are you ok?”

“Great. Just checking my flight details.”

Timmy winces. “Yeah… I should probably look up when I’m…" He drifts over to the window and fiddles with the shutter. “You got through your close-up quick. Was it easy?”

“Sure.”

“It’s hard, well always hard for me, but I’m too.. it’s hard shooting the goodbye scenes.”

“Yeah, it’s sad to say goodbye to characters you like.”

“Armie.”

“What?”

“Don’t do that.”

“What.” He tries not to make it a question.

“Ok, whatever." Timmy's quiet for a bit, then he says, "it’s weird that we shoot the kiss scene last, don’t you think?”

“Logistics. Nightshoots are harder to organise, better to do it like this.”

Armie won’t look up from his phone but he knows that Timmy is staring at him and offering him another chance, before he gives in and says softly, “so we’re not going to talk about it? At all?”

Armie assumes a puzzled expression, makes his arms say ‘whataya want from me?’.

Timmy scrubs his hands over his face and when he emerges, he’s got tears in his eyes.

“I sort of hate you today. You’re a fucking _coward_ Armie.”

He slams out of the room and Armie says to the door, “You got there in the end kid. Took you longer than most is all.”

He naps until it's time for dinner. That is, he stares up at the ceiling, watching the shadows slide across it. 

Tim is late and initial murmurs of surprise give way to anxious phone calls, but eventually he appears. To Armie’s eye he looks like he’s been turned inside out but he’s calm, sits, eats, has a glass of wine. He takes a chair at the other end of the table from Armie and they don’t acknowledge each other. Armie notices Luca flicking his gaze between them. 

It’s easy enough to do the drunk scenes, it’s clowning really and Armie just pushes on through. When they get to the wall and Luca asks them to come and block out the scene, Tim follows along quietly, arms wrapped round himself, eyes cast down, but when Luca’s given his initial instructions, he looks up, business-like and professional, and nods, gives himself a little shake.

“Cool, right, let’s do this man.”

They plot the walk, the turn, the angle of their faces. Luca is happy. 

They do five takes of the last kiss. The second time, Luca puts him arm round Timmy’s shoulders and says, “Please, now, please. This is _the kiss of a lifetime_. Again.”

“It’s a fucking tautology Luca. How can you do the kiss of a lifetime _again_?” Armie snorts. He maybe didn’t mean it to sound so rude, but it does. 

“I know Armie. But that’s not what that was, was it? Reset please, again.”

It’s weirdly like being on stage and not knowing your lines. He follows the blocking because that at least has steps that take him from the beginning to the end of each nightmarish set of minutes spent trying to kiss Timmy without thinking about him at all. He makes an effort, for the fifth one, to get back to Oliver, who’s been MIA for days now, and he prays he might have limped towards some facsimile of the thing.

Luca calls cut and there's an awkward shuffling silence before he comes over.

“Wonderful Timothée. Wonderful.”

He doesn’t say anything to Armie. Fucker. “Happy?” Armie bites out, looking for something, anything.

Luca says, “It was fine.”

“Fine?”

“Yes, fine. What did you think?”

“I thought it was … fine I guess?”

There’s this weird sense of anti-climax. Luca calls that it’s a wrap and there’s a desultory round of applause. Everyone starts to pack up, but it’s pretty subdued. Armie starts to do the rounds, shaking hands and everyone is nice and so on and so on but it feels like something is off, like they were expecting more. It was a _kiss_ , a kiss the script _told_ them to do, staged and performed with a bunch of people watching. What did they all fucking expect? Fireworks to burst across the sky? The cameras and equipment to magically transform into their human selves? 

Tim’s standing against the wall looking at his shoes. It sounds like he’s singing to himself. Luca, at his elbow, follows Armie’s gaze.

“So did you get what you wanted?” he asks Luca.

“Did you get what you wanted?” Luca asks him back, and if it was anyone else….

Sayombhu calls Luca over and Armie makes one of his abrupt decisions and heads back to the hotel. He orders up a bottle of scotch and sits in the dark, drinking halfway down the label, ignoring the chirps from his phone and, later, the soft knocking at his door, and only just manages to remember to change his wake-up music before he passes out.

**

 _I wake up everyday it's a daydream_  
_Everythin' in my life ain’t what it seems_  
_I wake up just to go back to sleep_  
_I act real shallow but I'm in too deep_

That’s really unbelievably annoying. Upside down again, he lets Dizzee start declaring his bonkersness before he hauls himself up and out of bed. He thinks his way tentatively through his body and is relieved to find that he doesn’t have a hangover which is a small and very welcome miracle given the amount he drank last night. Where did the bottle end up, even? There’s another argument out in the street. Someone should tell that dime-store Romeo that shouting at his girl is never going to work. Although everything sounds better in Italian it will be really very nice to be able wake up in a place where mornings are quiet and orderly and other people’s domestic meltdowns are not continually playing out in public. He’ll miss the bells though.

He won't miss the shower, which pulls the same shit as yesterday, leaving him shivering and swearing as he hops into his clothes.

As he comes down the stairs, the maid is there, still staggering under a pile of towels, no doubt trying to be in his way a bit before he leaves. He breezes by with a smooth 'ciao'.

The same crappy moped with the whine swerves to avoid him as he steps off the curb and the driver throws a stream of lyrical abuse his way as he passes. “Fix your fuckin' engine buddy,” is the best he can manage in return. He kind of wishes he’d bothered to learn Italian properly if only so he could properly cuss someone out without sounding like a tourist.

They’re all there at the table, just like yesterday, and he feels a stab of irritation. It’s over, guys, face it. And now there’s going to be that long, drawn out goodbye that comes at the end of holidays and shoots like this, with everyone declaring undying friendship and making plans for reunions that will never happen. He decides not to offer any excuses for disappearing on them last night and risks a look at Timmy who just gives him a quizzical smile as he sits down and props his feet up on Armie’s ankles. Kid doesn’t give up. He shifts his legs. Timmy raises his eyebrows.

Armie waves back the espresso before the waiter has time to set it down and doesn’t say please this time when he asks for his Americano. 

He opens up twitter.

“Take your time this morning,” Luca is saying. “Walk around the town, do what you like. The Basilica Santa Maria Maggiore is very interesting. Back here at noon for the pensione scenes. We’ll have an early dinner, ready to be on set at 8pm, please.” 

It takes him a second and then he looks up. Luca is repeating his instructions in Italian and everyone is nodding.

“So do you wanna go to the Basilica Armie?” Timmy asks.

“Yeah, very funny.” Armie replies. He guesses this is revenge for his mood yesterday.

“You don’t? But you were saying the other week that you were sorry you hadn’t seen more of the architecture. You giant geek.”

“Fuck off Timmy. It wasn’t my fault that I couldn’t understand her but I’m not going back for more. Anyway I gotta pack.”

“But you can do that tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

Luca turns to him as people start to drift off. “A word please Armie.” And then Luca starts in on how he wants today to go, how important it is for Armie to be in the moment, yadda yadda, that he hasn’t been properly present for the last few days, and he’s sorry he punched him at the waterfall but he will punch him again if he doesn’t wake up. 

Armie lets him rattle on for a bit before he says, “OK, OK stop. Seriously, stop fucking with me.”

“I am sorry if what I say upsets you Armie, but it is my duty to this film to…”

“No no, look,” he takes a breath. “Just.. what day is this?”

Luca and Timmy exchange glances.

“It’s Monday,” Tim says carefully. “We got here yesterday. We had dinner. You went to bed early.” 

“Monday.” Armie replies. They’re looking at him with amused concern. 

“Are you feeling alright Armie?” Timmy asks, leaning over to touch his hand.

“I’m fine,” he snaps, snatching his hand away. “Fine. Tired. Just. I dreamed… I dreamed…”

“Excellent,” Luca says, standing up and clapping his hands. “You boys go visit the Basilica, have some gelato and we’ll see you back here at 12. Remember your sunscreen and.. stay in the shade, OK Armie? No drinking. Don’t be late back.”

Across the piazza, the bright yellow awning of the bookstall collapses.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Armie's still trapped in Day 34.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a nasty, slightly coercive moment at the end of this chapter, not enough to warrant a warning I think but tell me if you disagree. And I added a couple of tags.

That first day, or second day?, anyway, the second time Armie does Day 34, he stumbles through it, trying to ignore every sickening lurch of déjà vu which isn’t déjà vu because it’s absolutely fucking déjà DONE, but every time he tries to explain what's happening to anyone they give him a puzzled smile and get him a glass of water. He’s had so much water by the time he’s doing the window scene that he holds everything up by having to pee every 10 minutes and the shoot drags on into the late afternoon. At least that means Timmy doesn’t have time to cry at him until the evening, at which point the kiss of a lifetime disintegrates into a hideous hissed argument about Armie’s general fucked-upedness, perfectly audible to everyone with headphones.

Whatever he does, whether he wakes up, has breakfast with Timmy and Luca and the crew in the piazza, dutifully visits the Basilica, flunks his way through the hotel room scene, has an evasive conversation with Timmy and an awkward dinner afterwards, films the dance and the puke and the walk and the kiss between 8.36 and 11.04, _or_ stays all day in his hotel room with the door barricaded, trying to get hold of Nick who is off on some hiking trip where he can’t be reached, whatever he does, _nothing changes_. The clock ticks on and somehow he’s waking up again, Dizzee shouting, maid blushing, moped whining, Timmy… Timmy… and so it goes on.

Armie waits for it to stop and it doesn’t. He stays up all night with a wet towel wrapped around his head with Tame Impala on top volume, jamming a fork into his thigh when his eyelids droop. Doesn’t work. Somewhere before dawn tomorrow he slides back into today. He takes his phone and drops it down a drain. In the morning it’s back in his pants pocket. On the ninth day of Bonkers, he stalks out onto his balcony and sends the phone sailing across the piazza, the crew tracking the perfect arc of his throw until it smashes onto the cobbles and the moped drives over its remains. 

He wakes up the next day with a sense of resolve: he asks Luca for a private conversation and tries to explain that he has now lived this same day about 10 times, that he has now kissed Timmy against that wall 1000 times, he’s not sure how many, and that he either needs a psychiatrist or a bullet to the brain. There’s a lot of concerned conversation about how he must be so tired and how the shoot has been wonderful but challenging, and they call a doctor who pronounces him in excellent health and prescribes him sleeping tablets. Armie punches the doctor and spends the rest of the day in a police cell.

He tries telling Timmy, he really tries, over about two weeks in a few different ways: but either Timmy gets mad and accuses him of trying anything to avoid talking about what they need to talk about, or he gets worried and goes to Luca and says he thinks Armie’s losing it, or he tries to distract Armie by getting up close and putting his arms round him and each one of those scenarios ends badly. 

So he tries again to explain what’s going on to Luca, over breakfast and in the pensione and at dinner and while leaning his forehead against the goddamn wall while the crew mutter around them. Luca tends to treat it like an interesting philosophical problem for the first 30 minutes of these conversations: fascinating concept Armie, hmmm, infinite takes, the endless unspooling of a life, echoes of Nietzschean eternal recurrence etc etc, has Armie read Ouspensky’s _Strange Life of Ivan Osokin_? (answer: NO), but it always ends the same way, with Luca tearing at his hair and Timmy twisting his hands in his stripy little shirt and Armie yelling that no-one believes him even though he can recite every minute of this day by now.

No-one ever seems impressed by his preternatural ability to accurately predict events around town. They never even enjoy the best bits; like, one morning he tries to get Timmy to see the funny side of the flowerpot incident.

“Chill Timmy, the Basilica isn’t going anywhere, believe me, just come and sit here round here. There's some seriously funny shit about to go down over in the corner.”

Timmy comes round and sits next to him, and Armie grabs his chin and turns it away from himself and out across the piazza. “Now look, watch… no, not the bookstall, no don’t go over, they’re fine… now see Romeo over there. Keep your eye on the flowerpot… wait for it, wait for it, 5, 4, 3, 2…” There’s the sudden loud blast of a car horn as the moped skids and screeches its way out of the piazza and the girl on the balcony drops the flowerpot. It lands right on Romeo’s head and he goes down.

“Jesus!” Timmy jumps to his feet and starts scrambling around the table. “Oh my god, Armie quick, call an ambulance or something…” he looks back at Armie who is cracking up, tears rolling down his face.

“Every time, man, gets me every time. Ah, don’t worry, he’ll be OK tomorrow.”

The girl has come down and thrown herself over Romeo, weeping and wailing. Timmy looks daggers at Armie and goes over to assist by hovering around helplessly and biting his nails until an ambulance arrives.

By then, Armie has decided to stay in the café and eat until someone makes him stop. Timmy sits opposite him, arms folded, lips in a tight line. Lasagne. Gelato. Every flavour they have. Stubs his cigarette out in the gelato. More lasagne. It’s liberating. And Tim’s cross little face is freakin’ hilarious. 

It’s hilarious for about three days and then one morning he leaves Dizzee to bonkers as much as he wants, doesn't bother getting dressed, just puts on a bathrobe, and goes down to the nearest bar, the slightly seedy one off the piazza they’ve avoided so far. He drinks with focus and dedication, interspersing beer with red wine and then moving onto whiskey. He never asked for any of this, any of this shit. He warned them, didn’t he, that he wasn’t the guy for this. The patron starts to side-eye him and then gets on the phone. After a while Luca and a couple of the guys turn up and they haul him up out of there because his legs aren’t working so great. He pukes in the street and they put him in the shitty cold drizzle shower and then let him sleep before they drag him up again, pour coffee down him and deliver him to set. He’s still drunk really which is fine for the wall and the dancing but Timmy flinches away from the first few kisses. Someone gives Armie some mints and they hammer out a child’s crayon-picture version of the scene. Mid-kiss, Armie looks over Timmy’s shoulder at Luca and he’s got his head in his hands.

He finds other places to drink the days away and when he does turn up to the shoots, just to keep things _fresh_ , he takes to trying out different performance styles. He gives them Oliver as Jimmy Cagney would have played him, tries a little Streep, de Niro, young James Spader. He tries out a British accent for the lines, going for a weird Julian Sands vibe, and _nails it_. He raids his own back catalogue and does it as Illya a couple of times and once as Jackson Storm, which makes Luca attack him fairly early on. One memorable evening he acts every scene as Timmy which drives Timmy crazy, and that’s funny until Tim says, quietly, “why do you want to humiliate me?”

The day after Timmy says that he comes downstairs, knocks the towels out of the maid’s hands, nearly steps straight in front of the asshole moped and ignores Timmy calling out to him as he stalks past the café and heads out of town, pausing only to pull down the yellow awning over the bookstall. He stops for a rest under a tree a few miles out of Bergamo, and half an hour after call time his phone starts buzzing and doesn’t stop until he throws it into the long grass by the road and keeps walking. As night falls, he’s hungry and there’s nowhere to go and he doesn’t have any money, so he hitches a lift back to Bergamo where everybody goes nuts and yells at him. Tim is sitting in a heap on the sidewalk, in his Bergamo shirt, sucking on his Elio necklace. He can’t even look at Armie. The day after that, he makes himself keep walking, hour after hour, blindly, across fields and motorways and through villages. Night comes on and he stumbles, lost, through the dark, until he can’t see his hand in front of his face, getting colder and colder, and he feels like he might be about to walk off the edge of the earth. 

He's in need of some variety after that little portion of hell, so he withdraws all the money in his account, marches into the nearest car hire place and takes the only car they have, and drives to the outskirts of Milan crammed into a tiny tincan of a Fiat 500, chainsmoking, with his knees jammed on either side of the steering wheel and head knocking the roof every time he tries to stretch. He follows his phone to the nearest dealership where he leaves the Fiat on the side of the road, door swinging open, and buys a yellow Porsche Cayman GT4. He drives it straight out of the showroom and guns it round the open road for a while before he motors sedately into town. By the end of the afternoon his twitter feed is imploding with WTF!!!!! posts tracking his visits to bars, then a strip club, then a restaurant with some of his new friends from the strip club. There’s a shit-ton of coke at some point, then a casino where he loses and loses and loses, and by 2am he’s in a hotel room at the bottom of a pile of about ten naked bodies, and at least three phones filming from different angles, and it’s fucking horrible and awful, and he starts to cry and the clock ticks over…

It’s kind of a relief to wake up blameless after that one, and he celebrates by calling a taxi to take him to the airport, Timmy narrowly avoiding the flowerpot as he runs behind the car as it leaves the square. Stepping into the role of belligerent American, Armie shouts until he gets on the next available flight to JFK. He’s somewhere over the Atlantic, drinking champagne and flirting without pause with all of the flight attendants, while behind him, Italian time moves on and he wakes up back in Bergamo.

It's about a month more of Day 34s after that when he walks into the path of the moped and it’s only a little bit of an accident. It knocks him over and he hits his head on the curb. He spends that day in the local hospital with concussion, vaguely aware of Timmy’s voice somewhere close by as the room darkens.

When Dizzee wakes him he’s as good as new. He pursues self-destruction in a half-assed way a few more times: he tries standing in the middle of the main road for a bit, but the cars just drive slowly and carefully around him, children staring back at him out of the rear window. His heart isn’t really in it. He wants this to stop but Hammers don’t give up and there are reasons he has to stay on this old earth, even if he can’t move out of this one slice of it.

He does die twice, as best as he can remember. On their visit to the Basilica he gives Timmy the slip, and climbs to the roof, discovering a way out onto a little platform below the dome. He stays up there all day. Every time he moves he feels the rusty hinges strain and crack and as dusk falls they give way so that he falls and falls. Waking up from that one is horrible, the image of roof tiles and paving stones coming rushing up towards him takes a while to shake off. 

The second time he dies it’s because one morning he loses his shit with moped guy and runs straight out of his room in his boxers and tackles the guy off the back of his bike, so the crew have to come and haul him off and separate them. Moped guy reappears late in the evening, while Armie is up against the wall, sobbing into Timmy’s shoulder – it’s one of the days when even beginning the kiss just makes him weep, they’re particularly bad ones – and sticks a knife in him. Amid all the howling and screaming and just as the ambulance siren gets close and his vision starts to blur, Armie smiles up at Timmy who is crying and begging Armie to stay with him and says, “S’Ok Tim, we’ll be back tomorrow.” He stays out of the way of moped guy after that though, he doesn’t want to see that look on Timmy’s face again.

He sees just about every other look Timmy’s face can assume, although Timmy being Timmy, there’s always some new way he can crook his smile, or wrinkle his nose, or fucking _blink_ , jesus, that Armie can add to the collection.

There’s one terrible day when he sees a new expression and learns another one he doesn’t want to see again. 

They wrap the room scene. If there’s a notch below auto-pilot, Armie’s there. Afterwards, Timmy comes knocking. And Armie thinks, OK Universe you _dick_ , you keep sending him round here and so, what? You want me to fuck him? You want me to tell him that I…

He throws open the door and lets Tim burble on doing his attempt to get Armie to acknowledge that there’s "something between us". Then he gets a hold of him and tells him to shut up.

“OK. Us. You really want _us_ Timmy?” He sees Tim flinch but drives on anyway. He pulls him in by his waist and kisses him, rough and hard, uncaring of the tender skin round his mouth which will be on film tonight. “C’mon then. Show me.” He releases Timmy and pushes him back on the bed and crowds on top of him and kisses him again. Tim’s eyes dart up to his own, wide and hurt. He tries, there’s a pitiful little attempt to try and make it all a bit more normal when he kind of pets Armie’s ass but it’s wrong, all wrong, in every way, and Armie rolls off, hard in a miserable kind of way, and says, “Shit, I’m… look just _go_.”

Tim huddles, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “…was it… did I not…”

“God Tim, what do you want from me? You want me to bend you over, right? Just… do you so hard you can’t sit down and we’ll go to dinner and they’ll all know...”

“Whaaat?”

“Yeah, that’s isn’t it? You just want them to know. Show Luca how _committed_ you are.”

“Jesus Armie _no_ , what the fuck…?”

“Like you don’t walk around the whole time with your clothes falling off you, pants halfway down your legs, just begging to…”

“Don’t give me that asking-for-it shit, don’t you say that Armie. You’re better than this.”

“I’m not. I am absolutely not better than this. Now fuck off.”

That’s the worst day. Worse than the paving stones.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time in _Day 34_ :
> 
> "While all else fades, this moment is nothing less than eternal. So that is all I ask. A little piece of eternity for them to take home from the cinema, yes?”  
> “Got that Tim? We just need to give him eternity and then we can go get a drink.”  
> “I think I’m too tired Armz..."  
> “We can do it. One more." Armie holds him tight, whispers, "And this time… this time it’s us, ok?”


	3. Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bergamo Groundhog Day resolved

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things this chapter doesn't know anything about: moped maintenance; the geography and architecture of Bergamo; quantum physics.

__

_I wake up everyday it's a daydream  
_ _Everythin' in my life ain’t what it seems_

Things changed the morning Armie woke up and instead of staying in bed, or finding a different way to fight with Luca or make Timmy cry, he got dressed, went down to the bookstore and fixed the yellow awning before it could collapse and knock all the book tables over. Once he’d fixed one thing, he couldn’t stop. It was exhausting.

Day 34. Again. OK. Armie waves at the crew as he jogs out into the piazza. It only takes a minute to get the yellow awning fixed up now he has the knack, it’s just that the strut slips out of place if it’s not clicked in all the way. He has to keep one eye on Matteo so he can rescue him just in time from the flowerpot but he also has to be careful not to move too quickly otherwise Matteo freaks out and they tend to get into a fistfight which escalates pretty quickly and fucks the whole day up because Gina, the girlfriend, joins in and nine times out of ten ends up accidentally socking Tim in the jaw and knocking out his front tooth while she’s trying to get Armie off Matteo and Tim’s trying to get Matteo off Armie. The fuss with the tooth is _unbelievable_ , and Armie usually gets all the blame. This morning though, it goes beautifully. The blind is fixed and Signor Pozzi is delighted and gives Armie the book he always gives him and Armie thanks him warmly then counts it out and whisks Matteo out from under the flowerpot which falls harmlessly from balcony to paving stone, closely followed by Gina who throws herself passionately at Matteo and then at Armie.

Armie extracts himself and joins the crew over at the café to a round of applause. 

Tim puts his feet up on Armie’s crossed ankles and Armie squinches in to give him a calf-hug. When the waiter brings him an espresso Armie thanks him and knocks it back while Luca repeats his instructions for the day and then Armie listens patiently to his little lecture. He mostly finds it comforting now. 

He gets Timmy in a cheerful headlock and they start off towards the Basilica but once they’re clear of Luca’s watchful eye, Armie asks if they can make a quick detour. The detour takes them to the bank and the auto shop and then back round close to the piazza. In a narrow side street, the moped driver is clutching at his hair, kicking the tanked moped. He turns on Armie, eyes wild and Armie holds his hands up while Timmy plucks anxiously at the back of his shirt, trying to hold him back.

“it’s OK, it’s OK. I think I know what’s up with your bike – can I take a look?”

It takes a few more moments convincing him but eventually he steps back and lets Armie take a look at the bike.

Moped guy is frantic, he’s babbling away at Timmy, in a mix of English and Italian, but Armie knows the story: he bought the bike from someone on craigslist with his last bit of money, bad move, but he needs it for work, just got a job after months unemployed, and without that job he can’t pay his sister’s music tuition and she’ll have to give up piano… it’s just the saddest tale you ever heard, even if it doesn’t quite justify the time he stabbed Armie for breaking his bike. It took Armie a few days of investigating but once he’d worked out that fixing the moped would stop the kid from losing his mind over it and going home to get his knife to try and get his money back and it all ending in tears for everybody, he figures that it’s five minutes of his day well spent.

“You’ve got a hole in your exhaust,” he explains, “You just need some exhaust tape and luckily...’ he pulls out a roll of tape from his pocket, “I’ve got some right here.”

The kid watches him suspiciously but when it’s done and he’s circled the square a few times, the exhaust still whiny but sounding less like it’s about to explode, he comes back to hug Armie enthusiastically and Armie takes the opportunity to stick a little bundle of notes in his back pocket.

Timmy has watched all this with amazement. “Is there anything you can’t do?” he asks. “And how did you know…”

“We’d better get a move on if we’re gonna see this Basilica,” says Armie. “Those marquetry panels aren’t going to admire themselves.”

In the lovely, dim interior, Timmy tags behind Armie and the guide as they chat about the tapestries and the frescos. Armie’s all over this because he’s heard a couple of lectures about the Basilica. The University of Bergamo holds some of its classes in English so he’d taken to sneaking into lectures just to pass the time. He's _au fait_ with the epistolary form now, with particular reference to _Les Liaisons Dangereuses_ , having heard that talk a few times (the French professor is pretty cute). He’s done the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales and then read the rest of it over a few days in the back of the class because he had a few questions for the Medieval Lit Prof who was not at all cute but knew her shit inside out. There was a History of Art lecture on impressionism he liked. It was in Italian but he went quite often because he found the slides soothing and after a while he found he was picking up words and phrases and could sort of follow it. That had given him an idea and one morning after Tim had huffed off on his own to the Basilica, he withdrew fistfuls of cash, went back to the Pensione and found the maid. He used his new bits of Italian to ask her to meet him in his room that afternoon to …

… the first Day 34 he started this conversation she got really mad and it turned out she knew enough English to shout that she was not a whore and that he should go fuck himself, and the manager got involved, and then Luca, and then half the crew was there looking at him with disgust, and then Tim arrived, desolate, as he tried to argue that he didn’t think the maid was a hooker and that he just wanted Italian lessons –

“You’re starting to learn Italian on the last day of the shoot?” Timmy had said bitterly, “C’mon Armie you’re a better liar than that.” Cool, cool, start again.

He worked out how to phrase his question via Google translate and wrote it out carefully to give to the maid, plus the fistfuls of cash.

Magda was actually Polish, working two jobs to save up for a holiday with her girlfriend who waitressed over in the café. She was only too happy to call in sick to her second job cleaning at another hotel and give him an Italian lesson for 300 euros an hour.

She’s pretty stern and rolls her eyes at his efforts most of the time but he tries his best for her. He likes the way Italian feels in his mouth.

So, today, he can understand the Guide well enough and keep her talking while he gets to look at Timmy drifting in and out of the shadows of the ancient stone and emerging into pools of light slanting through the stained glass, the colours stroking at his skin and touching his hair.

When they’re done, the Guide (whose name is Maria and has a grandson studying at the University although she’s worried that he doesn’t work hard enough), has kissed them and promised to light a candle for them, they head out. Timmy lingers to take one last photograph and Maria says something to him as he waves goodbye.

“What did she say?” Armie asks as they start to walk back towards their piazza.

“She said.. ah…” Timmy blushes, “she said that my _boyfriend_ speaks very good Italian, especially for a Pole.” He nudges Armie, and Armie nudges him back and knocks him harder than he meant to and that turns into a playfight-chase all the way back to the Pensione. 

While Timmy gets into his stripes, Armie takes a moment to check in with Magda behind her pile of towels. They’re late back so he hasn’t got time for a lesson but he likes the look on her face when he gives her a bunch of cash so he books a session for the pretend tomorrow. He feels like he’s cracked Italian so maybe he’ll start learning Polish. 

They’re still feeling high and silly when Luca calls them up to the room to begin their scenes and it bubbles into Elio and Oliver’s hilarity, tumbling like puppies around the little room.

Luca likes what they do with it but then they have to calm it all down as they reset for Oliver’s close-up and Luca always goes quiet and wary in this moment. It’s hard, after all these Day 34s to remember that Luca is still pissed with him, is maybe worried he’s lost his influence with Armie. It all seems far away to Armie now. He’s had enough time to think about it. The deeper Luca took them, the more Armie was aware of the shallows he was going to have to return to when all this ended and he was washed back up on the shore of his own limitations. The shoot had been a kind of miracle for him: he had heard himself, one night, after a bottle of wine, talking about himself as an ‘artist’ and could almost hear the chorus of mocking LA laughter. Armie Hammer, the artist. Right. Sit there and do the talking car, Armie. Take your top off. Do your funny face. Timmy was an artist. Luca was an artist. He was a hack. So he’d started to pull away and be an asshole so that when it was done it wouldn’t hurt so much. 

But that was only one strand of it. Mostly he’d been putting all his energy into keeping Timmy at arm’s length, which took some doing.

It had tipped over the line the night they shot the midnight sequence. There was a break after they'd got Oliver and Elio as far as the bed, something was up with the sound. He and Timmy were corralled into the bathroom and told to stay out of the way. Luca looked in on them from time to time. The minimal crew worked quietly, not the usual hollering back and forth you'd get on a day shoot, as if they were stagehands trying to slip through a blackout between scenes.

He and Timmy had been in a state of hushed giddiness, speaking in whispered half-sentences. Timmy sat in a huddle against the bath, Armie was back against the wall with his legs stretched out. They weren’t touching but occasionally he nudged Timmy’s toes with his. The feeling between them was of a thread held taught or as if they were balancing a bowl full to the brim with water which they had to pass between them without spilling a drop. 

Eventually they were told to be ready to go in two minutes and Timmy got on his knees and shuffled over to him, a dopey smile on his face, blinking. Armie had reached out and pulled him close, and Tim had reached up and touched his lips to Armie’s, just the slightest contact. Armie had laughed against his mouth, murmured, “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

It was such an Elio answer but it was all Tim in his arms.

“Something.”

“This, then.”

And he had opened his mouth to Timmy’s for the first time properly as himself, let their tongues touch, felt the silk on the inside of his lip, caught his chin to keep him still so he could drift kisses all over his sweet face. Then they’d been called into the bedroom and they had drawn that feeling out over the whole night, able to be Olive and Elio in one moment, Timmy and Armie left behind for a while, then catching them up and becoming themselves again.

Waking up from that the next day had been brutal, almost as bad as the worst Day 34 has been able to throw at him. Which was why the last weeks of the shoot had been about exorcising all of the feeling created in the alchemy of that cool aquamarine room. Armie makes it a rule never to return from a shoot with more baggage than he went in with. No excess weight penalties to pay, no awkward disposal of clothes which looked just the thing in a Moroccan suk but strictly dickish in LA, or the claggily sweet digestif that was nectar night after night in the friendly Greek taverna but at home takes like cough medicine. Leave summer where it belongs and follow the red line in the airport back to the dull lines of cabs and the creep of the city.

Only it hadn’t worked. No matter how much of a dick he tried to be, however much he tried to struggle against it, he sees now that like Prof Perlman’s statue, he’s been melted down and recast. Not as a particularly voluptuous Venus but a new man nonetheless, pulled up from that liquid place and into the dazzling sun.

Here he is again, naked by the window, Elio asleep behind him, Oliver’s heart breaking with the dawn. On the bed, for the first time in all the Day 34s, he doesn’t try to assemble his face in the right way. Luca isn’t trying to interfere, he just says, “Are you ready Armie?” He’s there even before Luca calls “action’. Maybe it’s something about Maria thinking he was Timmy’s boyfriend back at the Basilica. He’s hurt in two places now, he can’t be Timmy’s boyfriend here, in Day 34, starting from the beginning every morning. Even with all the time in the world, he couldn’t deserve him. And if he gets out, well, it’s over. Timmy gets away from him either way. He lets it in, that feeling, that fear, refines it to allow Oliver some room and lets it settle through his face, the set of his shoulders.

Luca is happy. Armie asks if he can stay. He sits in the corner while they shoot Elio sleeping. He loves the feeling in the room, everyone quietly watching Elio sleep, like they’re holding him there, empathising with his yearning dreams and witnessing his last moments with Oliver before they have to part.

When they’re dismissed, Timmy is sleepy, perhaps still in Elio’s dreams, and when they stop outside Armie’s room, he asks “Can I stay with you?” and Armie says, “Always.”

They lie down, on their sides, face to face, and don’t talk for a long while, until Timmy says, “You’re so different today.”

“I’ve been different for a bit.”

He lets Timmy hold his hand, lets him turn it over in his own, stroking his knuckles, running his long artist's fingers around Armie’s, bringing it up to lips to kiss his palm and his wrist. Timmy is hesitant, careful, he’s worried that Armie is going to snap back into dismissiveness and withdraw. He plucks at Armie's shirt buttons, rubs his face into Armie’s neck. 

“Uh, where did this come from? I mean, I’m glad, but you were so mean last night. And you wouldn’t talk to me about … us.”

“I’m sorry. I just got.... stuck.”

“You made me feel like I’d been making it up.”

Armie knows that because they’ve been here before. A day or two after he first fixed the awning, he let Timmy into his room and listened. The next day he managed to reply. So now he knows that if he allows Timmy to feel safer and drowsier and happier, his touches will get more confident, and then he’ll lift his face and ask for … no, _demand_ a kiss. Armie knows that if he sits Tim on the edge of the bed and kneels in front of him, and drops kisses up the line of his neck, strokes his lips along the line of his soft hair and licks a little at the sweat behind his ear, he will start to gasp and clutch, unless Armie holds his wrists down. And he knows that he can make it harder for himself to hold those wrists where they are if he starts to impress gentle bites along his jaw, pull on his earlobe. Timmy likes to be teased, as long as it’s serious. He _says_ he’s not that into feet but if Armie traces a feather line from the heel of Timmy’s sole, across the arch of his foot and upwards to dipple his fingertip into the gaps between his toes, then colours the sketch he’s made with his tongue, Timmy will squirm and grit his teeth – it’s edging unbearable but the rub of Armie’s lip across the bridge of his foot will relocate the feeling, balance it out and move them on. He’ll let Armie take his shirt off, hold him on his lap and stroke his chest, but he gets ticklish and wriggly if Armie goes near his armpits.

If he waits until Timmy is half strung out from kisses and relief, he can persuade him that they can be late for dinner and text an excuse about preparing for tonight, then they can keep making out for hours, crossing back and forth between nownownow and wait…wait…wait. But as the time creeps on, Timmy gets antsy and they usually end up racing out to make it to the restaurant before the first course.

Armie suspects there’s nothing he could learn which would keep Timmy from being on time for his director. 

**

“Action!”

They’re just the right level of tipsy when it’s time to shoot the kiss. Timmy is acting Elio a little drunker than he is himself, moony, gazing up at Oliver, his mouth open with that eternally hungry look that he gives to Elio, like the first kiss in the grass, when he just came at Oliver, not with a tentative lips-first seduction but with an open mouth: kiss me, fill me, feed me. But behind his Elio eyes and his open Elio mouth is Tim, looking at Armie. They’re three takes into the kiss of a lifetime. Armie’s back hits the wall... something on the camera fucks up.

“Stay there, stay there…” Luca calls.

They go in for it again, the light is wrong. Another and something about the angle of Armie’s face doesn’t work.

The next version of the kiss is going on for a long time, too long, he’s hard and aching and no longer cares to try and hide it from the crew, what’s the point? 

“Tim...” he breathes.

“Cut.” 

Their heads drop to each other’s shoulders.

“This is too much…” Timmy says into his neck.

He can hear the conversation between Luca and someone else.

“Too many Tims. One we can live with…”

Luca comes over to them. “That’s good Armie, it’s right. Do it again, and let’s keep it wordless..”

“You hear that Tim? It’s right, right? 

“I can’t… I can’t do this again…”

They share a little spike of frustration and in the next take, Timmy follows it through, he smacks his hand against the wall behind Oliver’s head.

“No, no, no… Why are you angry with the wall? It’s not going anywhere. It’s him who is leaving,” 

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Tim moans. “This is the end, right? Maybe I should be angry that it's all over.”

“But why do you think we shot in this order?” asks Luca, Socratic, ever-patient.

They wait. It’s a Luca question. There’s an answer on the way.

“Because this is the moment that remains. When all else fades, this kiss is nothing less than eternal. So that is all I ask. A little piece of eternity for them to take home from the cinema, yes?”

“Got that Tim? We just need to give him eternity and then we can go get a drink.”

Luca puts an arm around them both.

“You’ll find it. This is the moment of balance, everything is here. The past and the future, but all that matters is the moment. I know to ask for the kiss of a lifetime again seems tautological,” (Armie gives himself a little tick on his Day 34 Bingo card) “but a retake is not a repeat, you understand. Each moment can only be itself.“ Luca warms to his theme and the crew gives the little collective sigh it makes when they just have to wait until he’s finished. “Each reworking is unique and yet we are simply reassembling what was already there.”

“Like Ouspensky’s _Strange Life of Ivan Osokin_ ,” Armie says. He’d read it after the 50 billionth time Luca had mentioned it. It was good in places, but Ivan was a dick who should have been nicer to his mother, basically.

Luca peers at him and shakes his head, “Armie, you are full of surprises today. Reset.”

“Thing is,” Tim says quietly, when it’s just them again, “this has been the best day of my life man. But it’s been a really long one.”

It has been that, a really long day. But for the first time in all the varied levels of this nightmare Armie realises that he would happily live this day again, all of it, if it ended like this, Tim in his arms, the kiss nearly in the can. It wasn’t that he was perfect in it, god knows, but he was OK. And if he wakes up tomorrow and Dizzee is shouting Bonkers at him and he has to do it all again, then he can live with that. 

Armie looks at Timmy, _really_ looks, and he’s been looking at this face for fuck knows how long now and there’s still more to see, and if he ever got to wake up to a new day there’d be more to see tomorrow and the next day and the next. It’s enough to know that.

“I think I’m too tired Armz…”

“We can do it. One more. And this time… this time it’s us, ok? Because… I love you. And I’m not going to be able to stop loving you just because Luca says it’s a wrap.”

“Action!”

*

The crew start to pack up, Luca dismisses them. Armie folds Timmy under his arm and they make slightly unsteady progress back to the pensione. 

By the time Armie gets his clothes off Timmy’s like a pod of himalayan balsam, straining, ready to pop at a fingertip touch. When Tim says “please, please…” his scruples fade and he slides to his knees and lets himself wrap his mouth around Timmy’s cock, lets him push down into his throat, wants to fill himself with all of Timmy until he can’t think about anything else but the right _now_ of this. He tries to go slow, to savour it but it’s too lovely to wait for and he’s been waiting for so long; he smooths his hands down Timmy’s thighs, pulls him as deep as he can, feels Timmy’s fingers scrabbling in his hair, his knees going weak, buckling until he’s tipping backwards onto the bed and Armie lets him topple, following him to suck him down again, relentless and wanting, chasing every shocky tremble through Tim’s frame; sinking down and pulling back, rubbing his lips right _there_. This is his new lesson for this day, when to suck and when to lick, how to hold Timmy right on the edge until he’s bucking off the bed, one heel anchored onto Armie’s back and letting Armie keep at him until he’s coming with a long drawn out groan that Armie can feel through his whole body.

They lie on top of the covers, exchanging arm’s length touches, keeping the distance between them a little because now it’s delicious. Timmy pinches him _hard_ by Timmy standards.

“I like you like this. Don’t change again OK?”

“I won’t… I’ve been learning some things.”

“Yeah? Like what? I mean apart from Italian apparently. And how to blow me so I can’t see straight.”

Armie reaches for the book that Signor Pozzi gave him after he saved the blind. It’s the snappily titled _What is Time? What is Space?_ , an English translation of a book about quantum physics by an Italian scientist called Carlo Rovelli. 

He’d felt pretty hopeful about reading a book about time loops and he gave it a long time… well, he got really into it over one day and tried watching Carlo’s lectures online but it’s stayed mostly incomprehensible. He’s gonna need a lot of Day 34s to get his head round quantum physics. There’s one line that makes sense to him though. 

“Well, says here,” he coughs and assumes a professorial tone, “the quantum state of a system must always be interpreted relative to another physical system. And… I think the quantum state of me doesn’t make any sense unless it’s relative to the physical system of … you.”

“Me.”

“Yeah.”

Tim rolls into his arms again. “Let’s test that theory.” He picks up Armie’s hand again and sucks his fingers into his mouth. 

Some time later, Armie throws on a robe and goes to steal lube from Room 12. He knows it’ll be there and that the door is unlocked. There were a few days where Room 12 was a place he spent some time.

Back with Tim, on Tim , _in_ Tim, he gets to watch his face while he fucks him, feeling their shapes change again, becoming a new version of themselves. Timmy’s body moulds to his, makes space for him and clings to him, so hot and real and full of life. He tries to hold back and not to be too fierce with him but he wants to have his hands everywhere at once, on his neck, gripping his hair, spanned across his chest as he bends to suck his nipples. And he tries to make it last because it’s unbearable to think that in a little while, he’ll wake up and Timmy will be sitting across the table from him, back to being guarded and uncertain, and maybe he’ll never get it right enough again to end up here, pushing into him, perfect and open as he is. But eventually, he can’t hold on any longer.

“Tim, I’m gonna…”

“Do it. I love you.”

And he thrusts once, twice more and comes, with his eyes open, keeping Timmy in view, hoping that whatever trickster power it is that's kept him in Day 34, it's merciful enough to let him remember how this feels.

*

__

_I wake up everyday it's a daydream  
_ _Everythin' in my life ain’t what it seems_

Armie open his eyes and sighs. His feet are on the pillow. OK, so still in yesterday then, but it was a good day, maybe he could just live in this day and…

... someone is laughing in the bathroom.

“Oh fuck.. Armz, I’m sorry man, I forgot I changed your wake-up song…”

Armie sits straight up. He’s almost too scared to look but when he hears the voice in the bathroom start to rap along with Dizzee, he scrambles out of bed and throws the door open. Timmy is standing by the sink, damp from the shower and wrapped in a towel, brushing his teeth with Armie’s brush. “S..ry,” he says through foamy spit, gesturing sheepishly at his mouth, “y..r br..sh…”

Armie crosses to him one stride, grabs him by the shoulders and kisses him, foam and brush and all and says dazedly: “You’re here! You’re here!”

Tim wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and says, “Well sure I’m here. You lay on me all night so it wasn’t like I could get away.”

“And it’s tomorrow? It’s actually tomorrow?”

“Uh, yeah, Armie, I mean it’s today, are you OK man?….” Armie lets go of Timmy to rush out of the bathroom and over to the window but then dashes back and kisses him again, “just.. stay there OK? Don’t go anywhere.”

At the window he throws open the shutters. The bells are ringing and the yellow awning is rippling in the breeze. Across the square he sees Matteo, shirtless, on Gina’s balcony. He waves madly at Armie and yells – this guy clearly doesn’t do quiet – “grazie amico mio!” – Gina appears next to him, wearing his shirt, and pulls him back into their room and he goes, with a comedy shrug at Armie. 

Magda's sitting outside the cafe, she’s with her girlfriend and she gives him a cool nod when he calls “Ciao Magda!” It looks like they've got a pile of brochures and he really hopes they’re going to use his 300 bucks on a holiday.

He turns back to Timmy, clean and dry and entirely beautiful, coming over to be kissed, peering at Armie’s phone. “I can't turn it off.. your phone is like some kind of…”

“No… no… leave it…,” it occurs to Armie that he hasn’t actually listened to the whole song through in all this time. “Leave it.”

He’s happy not to know what’s coming next.


End file.
